POPLAR — Barry Allen Beach has maintained his innocence every
day since he confessed two decades ago to the brutal 1979 murder of
18-year-old Kimberly Nees outside Poplar.

A nonprofit group, Centurion Ministries, believes Beach and hopes to
free him as the group has 40 others who were wrongly imprisoned across
the nation.

Just 17 years old when the crime happened, and barely 21 when sentenced
to 100 years without chance of parole, Beach has spent more years in
prison than out.
For roughly six years, Centurion Ministries has been digging up
witnesses and evidence in the 27-year-old case.

Their work culminates on March 1, when Beach, who turns 45 this week in
prison in Deer Lodge, is scheduled to go before the Montana State Board
of Parole and Pardons.

"This is essentially Barry's last chance for freedom," Centurion
Ministries founder Jim McCloskey said from the group's headquarters in
Princeton, New Jersey.

Centurion investigators spent the last few weeks knocking on doors to
line up witnesses.

And in late January a Dateline NBC crew spent a week in Poplar
interviewing people for an hour-long show that will include footage
from the upcoming clemency hearing.

Around 7 a.m. on June 16, 1979, two tribal police officers went to
investigate a truck parked on a bluff overlooking the Poplar River
bridge. They saw blood inside the locked vehicle. A clump of bloody
hair was on the ground.

Following a drag trail, they discovered Nees partly submerged, face up
in the river.

Just two weeks earlier, she was giving the valedictorian speech at her
graduation.

Popular and pretty, Nees' death rocked the town of about 1,000 people.

"Everyone was wondering who the hell did it," said Poplar rancher
Richard Holen, who was 19 at the time. "A lot of people were afraid.
There was a lot of talk — there still is talk. They've got a lot of
unanswered questions."

People moved in with relatives, too frightened to live alone.
"It was a real shocker," said Glena Lockman, Nees' cousin. Four years
older, she babysat Nees and her sister Pam when they were growing up.
"She was a fun-loving kid. It's still hard to talk about."

Being on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the FBI, tribal police,
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Poplar city police and Roosevelt County
Sheriff's Office all investigated the crime, but no one was immediately
charged or arrested.

Twenty years later, the case is once again the talk of the town.

"Maybe they'll get to the bottom of it, maybe the truth will be brought
out," said Dun O'Connor, who has lived north of Poplar all his life.
"If they're digging into it, there must be a reason. We'll wait and see
what they find out."

More than 100 Poplar residents have signed a petition for Beach's
release.

THE CRIME SCENE: The body of
18-year-old
Kimberly Nees was discovered near Poplar River Bridge in June, 1979.
Two years later Barry Beach went to jail for her murder with no chance
of parole.

Barry Allen Beach

Kimberly Nees
/PHOTO BY LOUIS
MONTCLAIR

Most of Nees' family has left Poplar. Lockman is
one of a few relatives
that met with Centurion Ministries to hear their case. While she once
believed Beach was guilty, she now says she is certain he wasn't there
that night.

"I feel strongly that he's been imprisoned wrongly for the last 25
years," Lockman said. "Something's got to be done."
In 1991, Beach saw a 60 Minutes' story about Centurion Ministries
freeing a wrongly convicted Texas man from death row.

He wrote the nonprofit group a letter begging them to take on his case.
The group gets more than 1,000 such requests a year and Beach's didn't
rise to the top of the pile for seven years.

For two years the group reviewed court and police records before
deciding to meet Beach in Deer Lodge in August 2000.

"Right then and there we began an investigation of his case," McCloskey
said. "We are convinced Barry had nothing to do with the crime."

McCloskey said considering the group's resources — they have a paid
staff of five people in addition to volunteers — Centurion only takes
cases when they believe the person convicted had no role in the crime.

Centurion interviewed more than 200 people, following tips to North
Dakota, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Louisiana.

Living in Louisiana with his father, Beach was arrested for
contributing to the delinquency of minors in January 1983.

He was held in jail on the misdemeanor for three days before two
officers questioned him for hours, trying to link him to the abductions
and deaths of three young local women.

By the day's end, Beach confessed to their deaths and Nees' murder four
years earlier.

Beach, then 20, told police that he and Nees were parked in her
father's truck when Nees rejected his romantic advances.

According to the reported confession, Beach got angry and strangled
her. Nees escaped out the driver's door and Beach came around the truck
and repeatedly hit her with a crescent wrench.

He then dragged her body and pushed it over an embankment. He returned
to the truck several times to cover his tracks, throwing evidence into
the river, he told police.

His confession to the Louisiana crimes didn't stick — authorities later
arrested other suspects. Centurion says Beach wasn't even in the state
at the time.

But a jury sitting in the Valley County Courthouse in Glasgow a year
later convicted him of killing Nees.

Lockman and others in Nees' family sat through the entire trial.

"It was a relief to us, especially her folks," she said. "I went to the
trial and totally believed he did it. What are you suppose to think? He
confessed. But I look back now ..."

Centurion Ministries maintains that the entire case against Beach is
based on his confession and allegations that Beach's pubic hair was
found on Nees' sweater.

The hours of interrogation before his confession weren't recorded.
Therefore Beach can't prove his claims that the officers threatened
that he would get electrocuted if he didn't confess and describe the
process in gruesome detail.

Back then, crime lab specialist Arnold Melnikoff was making a name for
himself with his skill of matching hair samples.

His analysis that said Beach's pubic hair was among three dozen found
on Nees' sweater never was submitted as evidence.

But Marc Racicot, who was the special prosecutor from the state
Attorney General's Office at the time and was later elected governor,
mentioned the hair in his opening and closing statements as proof that
Beach was guilty.

Years later, Melnikoff's methods have been widely discredited. He lost
his job in the Washington state crime lab and two Montana cases were
overturned after DNA evidence proved that Melnikoff was wrong in
testifying that hair samples matched the suspects.

In a lengthy story last October, the Missoula Independent weekly
newspaper reported that Racicot had to concede that the hair evidence
was inadmissible because a Poplar police officer whose daughter was a
possible suspect had broken into the evidence room on a night he was
supposed to be guarding it.

The Montana Attorney General's Office reviewed nearly 400 cases that
relied on Melnikoff's hair expertise, but Beach's was never considered
because the scientist didn't take the stand.

Recently a court granted Beach the right to test the hair to see if it
matched his DNA, but it's gone.

Centurion searched the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Office evidence room
and interviewed officers and prosecutors in the case, but can't find
the hair or other evidence potentially carrying DNA, including
cigarettes, beer cans, a bloody towel found near the scene and
fingerprint samples taken inside the truck.

Racicot told the jury that 25 details in Beach's confession could only
be known by the killer. He never elaborated as to what those elements
were.

In fact, Montana law enforcement told Louisiana police there were nine
things that would verify Beach was the killer. Centurion Ministries
says Beach only fit one of those elements — the murder weapon.

But the suspected murder weapon was so commonly known that a local
hardware store displayed a crescent wrench, Nees' picture and a sign
asking for tips to solve her murder.

Evidence at the crime scene doesn't fit Beach's description of how the
crime occurred, according to Centurion.

FBI investigators said the crime scene suggests that Nees was first
beaten in the truck. Blood smeared the passenger seat and was
splattered on the ceiling.

She was then dragged out of the passenger door — not leaving on her own
power from the driver's side as Beach said. Covered in blood, the
killer or one of the killers then slammed the door, leaving a bloody
hand print on the passenger window that matched neither Nees nor Beach.

Outside the truck, she was bludgeoned as many as 30 times, likely with
multiple tools.

Three sets of footprints were spotted along the drag trail to the
river. One person wore clogs or flip-flops and another was barefoot
with feet far larger than Beach's size 8s.

The footprints and the location where her body was found also don't fit
Beach's story. He said he dragged her then pushed her over the
embankment.

But the evidence suggests that someone then climbed down and further
pulled her along the river bank and into the water.

The state's former forensic pathologist, the highly respected Dr. John
Pfaff, testified that Nees was never strangled, as Beach said. And
though Beach said he grabbed her by the shoulders to drag her to the
embankment, her shoulders and head were bruised as if she was dragged
by her feet.

Pfaff also said Nees was not raped and sexually assaulted, leaving it
unexplained why Beach's pubic hair would allegedly be on her sweater.

"The confession is full of contradictions and shows a complete
ignorance for how the crime unfolded and the evidence left behind at
the scene," McCloskey said.

No physical evidence places Beach at the scene and no witnesses place
him outside of his house that night.

Before his Louisiana arrest, sheriff's deputies interviewed Beach
twice. He told them he spent the day at a local swimming hole, where
his vehicle got stuck in a sand bank.

Failing to get the truck out, he left his friends, walking to town and
eventually hitching a ride home. There he ate and, being tired and
frustrated, went to bed early.

His mother didn't know what time Beach went to bed, but did see him
sleeping the next morning, wearing the same clothes as the day before.

In his confession, Beach told the officers he burned his clothes that
night to destroy the bloody evidence.

When pressed to explain, Beach said that his fingerprints weren't in
the truck because he wiped the interior clean. Yet investigators found
40 prints inside — 28 of which were identifiable but didn't belong to
Nees, her family, the officers who found the truck or Beach.

Though their investigation has focused on finding evidence to exonerate
Beach, Centurion developed a case that Nees was killed by a group of
jealous girls.

Nees reportedly went on a date with the boyfriend of one of the girls,
sparking them to beat her up. They went too far and killed her,
Centurion claims.

The group found numerous witnesses who overhead the girls saying that
they got away with murder. Others have more specific statements — that
the women confessed to Nees' death.

A tribal policeman saw two of the women driving away from the murder
site in the early morning hours.

Recently, a man who was just 10 at the time came forward. He lived near
where Nees was killed and remembers hearing her scream before he hid in
the brush, watching while the women hit her with a tool.

One witness died. Another, the soon-to-be ex-husband of one of the
suspects, was killed by the suspect's then-boyfriend. He threatened to
reveal his wife's confession to Nees' death as part of the divorce
proceedings.

So they took the case to the only person who can free Beach — Gov.
Brian Schweitzer.

The Montana Board of Parole and Pardons agreed to give Centurion
latitude in bringing in witnesses and evidence to prove Beach's
innocence at the March hearing. They will choose whether to recommend
to Schweitzer that Beach be granted clemency or his sentence be changed
to allow a chance for parole.

"We believe any objective and fair-minded person will look at the facts
and come to the same conclusion that we have," McCloskey said. "And
that is that Mr. Beach is a completely innocent man."

Centurion will put on what amounts to a second trial. But unlike his
first trial, no one can be ordered by the court to testify at the
upcoming hearing.

Witnesses must choose to drive 488 miles on winter roads from Poplar to
Deer Lodge.

McCloskey has a dream list of 20 witnesses — some of whom are character
witnesses, others offer evidence of Beach's innocence.

He hopes half will actually make the drive.

Richard Holen plans to be there. Nineteen at the time, he remembers
seeing Nees driving toward where she was murdered around 2 a.m. He saw
at least three other women crammed into the truck cab.

Lockman also will testify — as much to push the state to prosecute the
"real" killers as to help free Beach.

Nees' mother Diane won't talk to Centurion. She stays steady in her
conviction that Beach killed her daughter. Nees' father has died.

As for Racicot, he told the Independent last fall that Beach confessed
and that the case has been appealed unsuccessfully to numerous courts.

"Any notion that there was somehow a mistake in the process is wanting
for credibility," Racicot said.

McCloskey counters that false confessions occur frequently, as
demonstrated by numerous exonerations achieved by his group and The
Innocence Project, another nonprofit group that bases most of its cases
on DNA evidence.

Back in Poplar, the whispers that had at one time hushed are buzzing
again.

It hasn't been easy for the Nees family. And it hasn't been easy for
witnesses, who fear they will be targeted for their testimony.

"I guess I can honestly tell you that I have no problem with Barry
being released," Lockman said. "Deep down I just want the real
murderers to be charged and brought to justice like they should be.

"I pray that it comes to rest one day. Whether that will happen ... who
knows."